Assignment 1

My first assignment for my freelancing is to submit a personal selection. This makes me a little uncomfortable simply because personal writing is exactly that; personal. I am conflicted as to whether I should share something small, something surface and easy to write, or whether I should share something bigger, something meaningful and extensive.
The only requirements for the selection are that it must share a personal story and offer personal insight or opinion on the main topic. It seems easy enough, I guess. We'll see.

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Delicate- Damien Rice

We might kiss when we are alone.
When nobody's watching
we might take it home.
We might make out
when nobody's there.
It's not that we're scared,
it's just that it's delicate.

So why'd you fill my sorrows
with the words you've borrowed
from the only place you've known?
And why'd you sing hallelujah
if it means nothing to you?
Why'd you sing with me at all?

We might live like never before.
When there's nothing to give,
well, how can we ask for more?
We might make love in some sacred place.
The look on your face is delicate...

So why'd you fill my sorrow
with the words you've borrowed
from the only place that you've known?
And why'd you sing hallelujah
if it means nothing to you?
Why'd you sing with me at all?

Everybody Knows, Memories Will Keep Us Alive...

If you don't want to try again because you think that we could never get back to good, there is nothing I can do about that aside from tell you that I think, if we both worked hard enough, that we could get there together.
If you can't try again because you don't think you could ever trust me the way that you did or love me the way that you did, I can only respond with "I love you, always and forever, no matter what."
You are my best friend and I never want to see you hurting again. And it is for that reason that I know that I need to walk away. I know that I hurt you and I know that you have changed; we both have. But I am completely devoted to you and to him, and that is what makes it so hard to let it go.
I don't know where life will take us, but I am confident that we will always be the best of friends. Our friendship has lasted through all of this animosity and all of the hard times and I think that, while it definitely tore us apart, it somehow brought us closer together at the same time.
I love you more than you could ever understand, but beyond that, I can offer no more reassuring words. I will move on from what we had, and I will focus on the now: The friendship that I have the opportunity to build with you, the things I get to experience with Wes, and the way we will all grow together.
I know that I will never completely let you go, I don't think that's even a possibility. I can't give up on us because I wont give up on you. But I will live for the now, live for myself, and live for the ones that I care about the most.

I love you.

Don't call me.
Don't come to work to see me.
Don't pretend to be my friend when I know that you will inevitably and deliberately stab me in the back just as you have many times before.
I will not be here to let you walk all over me at your convenience.
I will not put up with your bullshit.
I will not talk to you anymore.
I will be better with you out of my life.
My relationship with her failed, and a big part of that I blame on you.
You wrecked me; you stole my faith and my compassion and my ability to trust.
You stole every ounce of love that I had.
You turned me into this cold, heartless, asshole, and I am stopping it right now.
I will not put up with you putting me down, and I especially will not put up with you talking badly about the people that I care the most about.
She treated me better than you ever did, and you are a cunt for assuming otherwise.
You've pushed me too far this time.
I can finally see the person that I always hoped you weren't.
I gave you far, far too much credit, and I fully regret that.
It took three years, but now, I am completely done.
Goodbye.

So Christmas is around the corner and I’ve been thinking. Thinking about a whole lot of things. Thinking about why I haven’t blogged so much lately. Thinking about why certain things happen to certain people, and why certain things do not happen for certain people...

...Christmas is coming and I want to shed some light on what I think it’s about. Today, while at work, I thought about what Christmas means to me. I don’t think of it religiously. I don’t think about it as a massive gift-fest (although presents are always nice). I think of it as a time to give. You may ask, “what do you give?” I reply, “the same thing I always give. Hopes and happiness.” I try my heart out to make people smile. But there will always be some that I have come into contact with and wish to help but am unable to sit down and talk with them due to us having different schedules.

This is about one such person that I have spoken to on Notemine. I don’t know her real name. All I know is that she lives in America, and is an intellectual that I once sparked an excellent conversation with one day. This woman fascinates me because of her love for her partner who she misses dearly. She is unable to move on because she knows her love is true, she misses her partner who she left her due to discrepancies (I don’t know the full story) that they had while together. While she knows that she did wrong by her partner and wishes to change it, she also knows that it will take time and effort. One of the other things I’ve learned is that her and her ex-girlfriend share a child together.

Her name is “Lay_Me_Down_Gently”.

Every time I speak to this woman, my heart warms to her and makes me wish that I could pick her up every time she stumbles. So I am writing this in the hope that she can see my message and my outstretched hand. For her to understand that she is a fucking trooper and deserves a happy ending, given the endless struggle for happiness; the endless pursuit for a second chance. My intellectual friend, if you ever read this, you have my support in ANY way possible.

I want things to work out for you. You deserve happiness. For you, your girl, and your son. May your Christmas wishes come true. May ALL of your wishes come true. I wish to lay you down the night when you will be at your happiest and be able to sleep and dream of the great future you have ahead of you. I want to show you the future and help you live it to the fullest.

I want you to be happy.
I want you to smile and move forward.
I want you to walk with me along the stairwell to contemplation.

~AKS.

When I read this, it made me cry. It was a different kind of cry though; a kind of cry that I haven't experienced in a while. The kind of cry that happens when no one is around, but you still feel an overwhelming sense of compassionate love surrounding you. It was a good cry.
It absolutely astounds me that someone who knows nearly nothing about me could have such passionate opinions about my situation. I love the fact that there is still genuine kindness that exists in this world, even from strangers.
Thank you, AKS for your encouraging words. May you never underestimate the power of a kind heart and may your compassion be rewarded tenfold.

My Teacher

Before your smile, hypocrisy was my innocence. Before your touch, pornography was my romance. Before your compassion, anger was my character. But you showed me how to love, and for that, I will forever love you; my teacher.

I closed my eyes for a second, listening to the music flowing from the speakers and thinking about the subtext in the words that I was writing. Everything always has more than one meaning, because life is all about interpretation; some maniacal, some enriching, some just plain conspicuous. The way I see things may not be the way whoever may read this writing is seeing them. But who cares? It’s therapeutic nonetheless. Writing has always been my way of seeing emotion in a tangible form. You see, I pretend to be filled with proverbial self-awareness, but in all actuality, there is just too much continuously-present duality in my personality to ever be fully self-aware. I am in a constant battle with myself; a battle of wit and words. I know what I want to say and what I need to do, but for some unknown reason, things just don’t usually turn out the way I envision them to. Maybe it’s a stage.
I think we might know a lot about a lot of things, but never everything about anything. I have figured out, however, amidst my umpteen hours of hopelessly imperfect soul-searching, that I suffer from the 'don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone, so instead you kill it with cynicism and irrelevance' disease. And I don’t think I suffer alone, which is an ever-growing problem for people in this life; everyone bleeds the same way.

The Last Night

It was so hard to hear her say the things she said to me that she said last night. Not quite as hard as "I'm not in love with you anymore" but definitely comparable. I think the hardest part about it was the fact that she was affirming something that was always in the back of my mind; that I had lied to myself for seven months. Every time I was sad, every time I felt myself slipping, I told myself "it will be okay. You love her and she loves you; it will all work out someday. It has to. We will be together again in time. We will have our family back. It will all work out."
Those pep talks were what got me though the toughest days. The days when I would sit and cry for hours, thinking of the things I had lost, the ways that I hurt her, and the ways I had let them down. I always think about the way things could have been; I guess it's always my downfall. I have always known that I can't go back and change any of it, that's obvious. I just always thought that, in time, I would get it right; right enough for her to want me back.
It's hard to think that I am still here in this place where all I know is hurting. It's been so long since we broke up, but at the same time, it feels like it was yesterday. It's hard to think that I can't let go when it took her almost no time at all to get out of that place. Now, don't get me wrong, I would never wish this pain on her, I just wish that it still affected her a little more than it does. I can't really blame her for moving on, with everything that happened and everything that was said, but I wish I didn't have this overwhelming feeling that we never were as good as we thought we were. I feel like if she were as in love with me as she always claimed to be that it would have taken more time and more effort for her to to let me go. But, then again, I'm sure she thinks that if I were as in love with her as I claimed to be, that I never would have gone away. I know that I love her and I know that I always have; my leaving had nothing to do with love. And then, it had everything to do with love.
I know that I was the one who left, but I never let her go. I cried every night thinking about everything that she was going through and everything that we had gone through together. I wanted more than anything to be there for her, but I didn't know how. We were both so broken, and the fact that I was too weak to help her killed me. But I never lost my love for her. Even to this day she is the only one who has my heart. And even after everything we have gone through, she is still the only one that I trust with it.

The last month or so that we were together, I was always so afraid. I was afraid that we were losing our friendship, and that was the most important part of who we were as a couple. I tried to convince myself that it would be okay, that it would all work out in time, but that eventually led to everything that happened; all of that destruction and pain. Had I been more proactive, more involved, we could be in a totally different place right now. I just didn't know what to do to fix us and, because of my stubborn, hard-headed personality, I felt weakened by that. My relationship was falling apart and the girl that I love more than life was hurting in a way that I didn't know how to fix. It scared the hell out of me. The only thing I knew to do was leave. I thought that maybe if we had time apart that we would realize what needed to be changed and what needed to be worked on and we could start over again in a new place. But I never really conveyed to her that that was my intention, I just assumed that she would have known. I always had the intention of coming back, I just never told her that. And I knew at the time that I should have told her that, I wanted to, I just couldn't bring myself to look at her and ask her to work on something that was killing her inside. I don't really know why I expected her to work so hard on something that wasn't there and something that she wasn't sure she would get back. So, while I worked on loving her, she worked on letting me go. It was all just an extreme failure in communication. I am completly literate, but I have never really been good with words. At least not ones with feelings behind them.
I guess you really don't ever know what you have until it's gone. If I had known then what I know now, I would have stayed that night. I would have talked to her about everything I was thinking and everything that I thought we needed to work on. I would have never let her go. I would have put aside my stupid, selfish, foolish pride and let her love me the way I think she wanted to all along. Love could have worked it out better than space. Just another thing that I have learned.

From the time we met until the time we broke up, I had never been happier. She was everything that I ever wanted that I never thought that I deserved. Her love for Wesley fascinated me and her love for me was unbreakable. She made all of the anger in me disappear and erased everything that had scared me before. She had a smile that made my heart beat so fast that I thought it would explode. She loved me without hesitation and always kept me safe. She was my hero.
I miss her every single day. I am dead inside without her. Most of the time, I feel nothing; I am numb. The other times, all I feel is sadness. I have never been this sad. The only time that I am truly happy now is when I see Wes. He is the only thing that keeps me going.

You'd think that I would be different, seeing as how I grew up in a family where nothing was ever resolved because everyone just left it alone or avoided it all-together, but I guess I learned far less from that situation than I thought I did. I did what I always told myself I would never do, what my mother did, and what destroyed my family; I left. I left behind the two best things in my life, the two people who were my entire future. I didn't talk to her about how I was feeling, I just assumed, and I lost my family because of it.
I know that I can't change any of it now and that I need to come to terms with what happened and move on, but it's so hard to think about everything that I lost, everything that we lost, and everything that she is convinced we could never get back.
I just wish she knew that I would do anything in my power for another chance to be with her. I know that we have been through a lot, but I think that could make our relationship stronger, as long as we were both willing to make it work. She isn't in love with me anymore, and that is so hard for me to come to terms with. If I had the chance, I would marry her tomorrow, or today even. The note that I found that I wrote to Scott right before Kristen and I broke up still sits in my notebook. I don't really know why I keep it, since I know now that we will never be together again, but I guess I just like reading it because it reminds me of how much love I have always had for her. Even when we were struggling, I still wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. I know I need to move on, but I never want to lose that love. It makes me better, it makes me stronger. It always has.
I guess you really don't ever know what you have until it's gone. If I had known then what I know now, I would have stayed that night. I would have talked to her about everything I was thinking and everything that I thought we needed to work on. I would have never let her go.
One more chance is all I need to make it right, but she doesn't want it. As much as I think we can do it, she thinks we can't. So I guess the only chance I have now is to be the best friend to her that I can. I will always be there for her and I will always be there for Wesley. I just hope she knows that she always has my heart, and she will always be my girl.

Murdered by Misadventures: Journal

Her eyes were never as shallow as she had always made them out to be. I saw in them a depth that flowed beyond simple physicality and into a suspended dimension where everything ran together and time stood still. A dimension where everything was falling down around her, but she was always her own safe haven. In this dimension, everything was alright, even when it was shattered into a million pieces. Her life was fragmented and terrorized, but she was always there, always aware of her abilities and her necessities. Even when she thought she did, she never gave up hope.
Her eyes were always my favorite part about her. Her lips were second. I don’t know if she ever knew, or if I had ever told her, but I fell in love with her because of her eyes.


Beauty was always an intrinsic quality for her. I never questioned it, even for an instant, even when she told me the ugly stories of her past, and even when she went through her hardest times. Actually, I think that made her even more beautiful to me. She was always so strong, even when she and the rest of the world thought she was weak. She was never really weak, no matter how broken she was. That was what made her so beautiful.


The first day was incredible. Actually, it was incredible even before the first day. She stole my heart in an instant. I still don’t know if she knows it, or if I ever told her, but she was my love long before those three words were ever spoken.
Maybe it was the fact that she was so open to me from the beginning, or maybe it was just that she possessed every quality that I knew I would love to love, but it all just came so easily. I think that was the reason it was so scary, too. She took my hand and showed me the world through her eyes. Her eyes were always so beautiful, even when she was lost.